Calaboration 1.01 review

With official iCal support now available from Google's Calendar, it was only a matter of time before Google released a Sync tool for the Mac. Calaboration 1.01 is that tool - we take a look and see how well it performs.

by
Dan Frakes
, | 10 Feb 09

Should I buy Calaboration 1.01?

Expert's rating:

Google Calendar’s iCal integration isn’t yet perfect; we’ve experienced a number of minor issues. But we can’t blame these issues on Calaboration, which does exactly what it’s supposed to do and is very easy to use.

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Calaboration 1.01
full review

Thanks to support for the CalDAV protocol – a way to store, access and edit calendars online – Mac users can now use iCal to work with Google-hosted calendars, editing and syncing events, and even responding to invitations.

When Google first enabled iCal compatibility adding a Google-hosted calendar to iCal required several steps that included pasting complex URLs from Google into iCal. But now iCal support is official, Google’s Calaboration tool makes the task easy.

After launching Calaboration and entering the address and password for your account, the program shows all your Google Calendars. Check those you want to work with in iCal and click on the Add To iCal button; the next time you launch iCal, they will appear in the calendar list and automatically update. You can create and edit events in iCal or the Google Calendar site and changes are synced instantly.

Note that read-only calendars are greyed out in Calaboration unless you enable them in the preferences. The reason for this is that iCal doesn’t properly handle read-only CalDAV calendars.

Calaboration is smart enough to check Mac OS X’s Address Book to see if your “Me” card matches your Google Calendar account email address. If it doesn’t, you won’t be able to respond to event invitations for Google calendars, so Calaboration displays a dialog with a button to open Address Book.